Equinix Expansion Reflects Singapore’s Emergence as Cloud Hub

The office area of the Equinix SG2 data center in Singapore, which is being expanded to house more than 3,200 cabinets (Source: Equinix via Facebook).

Singapore continues to be the hot market for the data center business, as cloud providers and financial services firms seek more space to expand their Asia-Pacific operations. In the latest sign of Singapore’s growing prominence as a connectivity hub, Equinix said today that it will invest $28.5 million in Singapore to build a fourth phase of its second International Business Exchange data center (SG2), which will boost the number of cabinets available to 3,256.

“Cloud adoption in Singapore will accelerate rapidly in the next few years, with many companies such as the financial institutions identifying cloud technology as part of their business plans,” said Clement Goh, managing director, Equinix South Asia. “The expansion of SG2 will enable us to continue to meet strong customer demand and also further reinforces Singapore’s position as a global IT hub and home for businesses looking to expand in Asia.”

According to the Singapore Economic Development Board, Singapore is currently home to approximately 50 percent of South East Asia’s data center capacity. “Equinix’s expansion is yet another testament to the competitiveness of Singapore’s ICT sector,” said Andrew Khaw, senior director (Industry Development) of the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA). “In addition, Equinix’s close proximity to Mediapolis@One-North contributes to IDA’s vision of ICT as a critical differentiator to this flagship initiative to position Singapore in the international digital media industry.”

Expanding Reach of Global Customers

The expansion in Singapore has helped Equinix (EQIX) support a number of customers seeking global reach for their infrastructure.

“Equinix made it possible for Go Daddy to get online quickly in Singapore,” said Mikael Erminger, international data centers manager, Go Daddy. “With more than 10.3 million customers throughout the world, Go Daddy wants to give our customers the best possible Web hosting and email experience, regardless of their location Their infrastructure and regional knowledge helped us succeed.”

“Equinix has been a reliable partner, playing an instrumental role in driving our regional business growth,” said Grant Kirkwood, chief executive officer at Unitas Global. “Its high standards of consultancy, service and low-latency connectivity have allowed us to effectively manage multi-market projects across industries. With this significant announcement from Equinix, we are confident that we can capture new business opportunities.”

Boffo Leasing for Digital Realty

Equinix isn’t the only company experiencing strong demand from customers in Singapore. Digital Realty bought a building in Singapore in late 2010, and has quickly leased large chunks of space to blur-chip tenants including IBM, Adobe and SoftLayer, the world’s largest hosting provider.

That success is prompting other wholesale data center providers to take a closer look at expansion in Singapore, including T5 Data Centers. T5 has facilities in Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles.

“We are looking international, and we recently took a trip to look at Singapore and Hong Kong,” said Pete Marin, president of T5, during a session at the recent IMN conference on data center investing. “We are very intrigued by those markets. We haven’t made any commitments. But it’s really capitalism on steroids over there. We wouldn’t go over there on a speculative basis, but we would go over with US customers.”

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About the Author

Rich Miller is the founder and editor at large of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.

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